Nut Creams
Chop almonds, hickory nuts, butternuts or English walnuts quite fine. Make the French cream, and before adding all the sugar, and while the cream is still quite soft, stir into it the nuts, and then form into balls, bars, or squares. Three or four kinds of nuts may be mixed together.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have already turned to the book's French cream, the uncooked fondant that underpins most of the candy section. The only real technique here is knowing when to stop adding sugar.
- "French cream" means uncooked fondantIn this period a French cream is confectioners' sugar worked to a stiff paste with cream, or with cream and egg white, and kneaded smooth on a slab. It is not cooked sugar syrup, so no thermometer is involved; the texture is controlled entirely by how much sugar you beat in.
- If your fondant base uses raw egg whiteSeveral turn-of-the-century French cream recipes bind the sugar with unbeaten egg white. Nothing in this candy is ever heated, so use pasteurized egg white or a cream-only version of the base.
- The hinge: stop short on the sugarThe nuts themselves stiffen the mass considerably. Hold back roughly the last fifth of the sugar, stir the nuts in while the cream still slumps, then add sugar only if the paste is too slack to shape. Fully sugared fondant plus nuts crumbles instead of rolling.
- How fine is "quite fine"Aim for pieces the size of coarse sand, not powder. Larger fragments tear the fondant when you roll balls and make cut bars crack along the edges.
- No quantities are givenThe original assumes a cook's eye. As a starting point, about a cup of chopped nuts to a pound of finished fondant reads as nutty without falling apart; more than that and the candy will not hold a clean square.
- Butternuts and hickory nutsBoth were commonly gathered in season, though they were also sold in markets, and both are now hard to find outside farmers' markets and mail order. Pecans stand in for hickory nuts closely, and walnuts for butternuts, though butternuts are oilier and milder.
- ToastingThe book does not call for it, but five to eight minutes at 350F deepens the flavor of walnuts and almonds and drives off moisture that would otherwise soften the fondant in storage. Cool them completely before mixing.
- Shaping and curingRoll balls, or press the paste into a shallow pan lined with parchment and cut bars or squares once it has firmed. Let the pieces dry uncovered an hour or two so the surfaces set, then store airtight between layers of waxed paper. They keep about a week at room temperature.
- YieldA pound of fondant plus a cup of nuts gives roughly forty to fifty small pieces.
Uncooked fondant candies like this one belong to the era when candy-making moved from the confectioner's shop into the home, helped along by cheap, finely milled "confectioners'" or "XXXX" sugar becoming a reliable grocery item in the later nineteenth century. Boiled sugar work demanded a practiced hand and a hot stove; a French cream demanded only a bowl, a marble slab or platter, and patience, which is why household manuals such as the Butterick book could offer a whole section of candies to readers with no professional training. The nuts named here map the American nut basket of the time rather than a shopping list: hickory nuts and butternuts were foraged in the fall across the Northeast and Midwest, while almonds and "English" walnuts were bought rather than gathered. The invitation to mix three or four kinds together can be read as a frugal note as much as a culinary one, a way to use whatever the season had left in the pantry.